Many individuals, businesses, and organizations occasionally have a need for custom printed or electronically displayed products, such as birth announcements, party invitations, product or service brochures, promotional postcards, personalized holiday cards, or any number of other items. For printed products, some of these individuals and businesses turn to sources such as a local print shop for assistance in preparing the materials. Those having access to a suitable computer may perform the product design process themselves using any of the various specialized software products available for purchase and installation on an appropriate computer system or by using a Web-based printing service provider that takes advantage of the capabilities of the Web and modern Web browsers to provide document design services from any computer with Web access at whatever time and place is convenient to the user. For either or both printed products and electronically displayed products, web-enabled service providers, or at least those service providers having computer systems available for customer use, typically provide their customers with the ability to access and view pre-designed product templates and to enter information to create a customized product design. As used herein the term “product template” or “product design template” is an electronically displayed editable WYSIWYG product design having a pre-designed format. As used herein, the term “WYSIWYG” stands for “What You See Is What You Get” in which the product design template is displayed on the user's computer screen in a form indicating how the product will appear when printed. Thus, while the product design template is edited by the user, the product design template is being updated and displayed on the user's computer screen such that the product design template appears as the product design will appear if printed or otherwise electronically displayed. A product design template is typically used as a starting point for user personalization so that the format does not have to be created by the user or recreated each time it is used.
The use of pre-designed electronic product templates imposes limitations and constraints on the flexibility of the product design system and its usefulness to many customers. Traditionally, the template provider has individually designed each template by defining various components of the template, such as the size and position of all image and text areas in the template; the selection, cropping and positioning of all images; the color schemes and selection of colors to be used for template components having a color attribute, and so forth. The template designer adjusts the various components until the designer is satisfied with the overall appearance of the template.
Once a product design template is complete, it may be published by the service provider and made available to customers for selection and editing to allow the user to personalize the template design with customer-specific information. Because the product design template has been pre-designed, it allows a customer to quickly add text and upload images (or select one or more images from a number of possible choices that have been pre-selected by the template designer or service provider) to quickly generate a user-customized product design. However, user editing of the template is typically limited to allowing the user to add, modify and position text and perhaps upload images to be added to the product design.
Not only is this prior art individual template design method time consuming and a significant expense for the template provider, in several ways it limits the service provider's ability to fully satisfy the desires and requirements of its customers. For example, a product design template provider may have many electronic images that it would like to make available for use by its customers, but the template provider may only have the resources to produce a limited number of template variations, leaving many images unused and unavailable to customers. In addition, the size and shape of various products offered by the template provider requires that the template provider make image cropping decisions regarding the portion of an image that will be incorporated into a particular product design. Some customers may wish to modify the crop settings of an image. While Crop tools do exist which allow the user to modify the cropping boundaries of an image, when activated these Crop tools are typically opened in an entirely separate window or page without the ability to view the effects of the cropping in the product design without first exiting the tool or closing the window. Other tools may display the product design but do not update the changes to the image portion displayed in the product design until the Crop tool is exited. However, no tools currently exist which allow the customer to simultaneously view both the base image with a cropping indicator thereon (indicating the portion of the image appearing in the product design template) and the product design template displaying the portion of the image therein as selected by cropping indicator to allow the customer to modify aspects of the cropping window or image container and immediately see the effects of the modifications in both the cropping window and the product design. Furthermore, while some potential customers may like the image content of a particular product design template, they may wish to have more template editing capability to manipulate the size, placement, magnification, and portion of the various images in the design while simultaneously being able to view the result of such changes in the product design template.
There is therefore a need for a flexible electronic product editing and customization system that allows a user to select an image container of an electronic product design template and to readily and easily modify the placement, scaling, and displayed portion of an image associated with the image container, in a manner that allows the user to simultaneously view both the portion of the image selected for display relative to the base image associated with the image container and the resulting image content of the selected portion of the base image as it will appear in the product design as shown in the product design template.